Chilean filmmaker Raoul Ruiz, who had spent most of his life in French exile, is well known and appreciated amongst cineastes. This is true even though he realized his bigger productions, such as his adaptation of Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time” with Catherine Deneuve and John Malkovich, not until he was older. Ruiz’ work persistently defies any categorization or formatting and it is thanks to the efforts of Chilean documentary filmmaker Alejandra Rojo that the broader oeuvre of this film poet and wanderer between Latin America and Europe has now become accessible.

With a skilful montage of film segments from Ruiz’ multifaceted work, Rojo unfolds his biography and reveals it as a source for recurring motifs of his surrealistically undercoated films. From there, her documentary dives into the fascinating intellectual world of Raoul Ruiz.

Passionately interested in philosophy and the natural sciences, it was his ambitious goal to create a cinema of genuine visual thinking. Starting from his reflexions on exile as a basic constant of globalization and his thoughts about the mysteries of non-linear time in film - sharpened by his reading of Wittgenstein and Gödel - , Rojo’s film sheds light on the filmmaker’s aesthetic attitude: Ruiz summons the force of movie images as antidote against the serial manufacturing of the fictional.

(sh)

Alejandra Rojo

Alejandra Rojo was born in Buenos Aires and came to live in Paris at the age of 11. She studied cinema at the University of Paris and documentary filmmaking at the Ateliers Varan school. She subsequently directed several documentaries for French and Belgian television, as well as short and medium-length fiction films, which were shown in cinemas and on television. Her films have received numerous awards in multiple festivals. She has taught directing and script writing for a number of years at the University of Saint Denis. Her works include Deux soeurs/Two Sisters (1989, short doc), Non-lieux/Non-Places (1990, doc), Une nouvelle douceur/A New Softness (1996, short), Soins & Beauté/Beauty Care (1999, short), L’idiote dans la chambre/The Fool in the Room (2002, short) and Raoul Ruiz, contre l'ignorance fiction!/Raoul Ruiz, Against Ignorance Fiction! (2016).